Twenty Thousand Mornings

Twenty Thousand Mornings

Author: John Joseph Mathews

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2012-08-31

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0806187468

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When John Joseph Mathews (1894–1979) began his career as a writer in the 1930s, he was one of only a small number of Native American authors writing for a national audience. Today he is widely recognized as a founder and shaper of twentieth-century Native American literature. Twenty Thousand Mornings is Mathews’s intimate chronicle of his formative years. Written in 1965-67 but only recently discovered, this work captures Osage life in pre-statehood Oklahoma and recounts many remarkable events in early-twentieth-century history. Born in Pawhuska, Osage Nation, Mathews was the only surviving son of a mixed-blood Osage father and a French-American mother. Within these pages he lovingly depicts his close relationships with family members and friends. Yet always drawn to solitude and the natural world, he wanders the Osage Hills in search of tranquil swimming holes—and new adventures. Overturning misguided critical attempts to confine Mathews to either Indian or white identity, Twenty Thousand Mornings shows him as a young man of his time. He goes to dances and movies, attends the brand-new University of Oklahoma, and joins the Air Service as a flight instructor during World War I—spawning a lifelong fascination with aviation. His accounts of wartime experiences include unforgettable descriptions of his first solo flight and growing skill in night-flying. Eventually Mathews gives up piloting to become a student again, this time at Oxford University, where he begins to mature as an intellectual. In her insightful introduction and explanatory notes, Susan Kalter places Mathews’s work in the context of his life and career as a novelist, historian, naturalist, and scholar. Kalter draws on his unpublished diaries, revealing aspects of his personal life that have previously been misunderstood. In addressing the significance of this posthumous work, she posits that Twenty Thousand Mornings will challenge, defy, and perhaps redefine studies of American Indian autobiography.”


A Thousand Mornings

A Thousand Mornings

Author: Mary Oliver

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2012-10-11

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 1101595973

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The New York Times-bestselling collection of poems from celebrated poet Mary Oliver In A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her life’s work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts. Whether studying the leaves of a tree or mourning her treasured dog Percy, Oliver is open to the teachings contained in the smallest of moments and explores with startling clarity, humor, and kindness the mysteries of our daily experience.


Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky

Author: Patrick Hamilton

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2013-10-30

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13: 159017772X

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NYRB Classics presents 3 darkly humorous, atmospheric novellas of love and disappointment, set in a run-down London pub after WWI—from the author of the Hitchcock classics Gaslight and Rope. “Bleak and brilliant. . . an authentic lost classic.” —The Guardian Featuring a Dickensian cast of pubcrawlers, prostitutes, lowlifes, and just plain losers who are looking for love—or just an ear to bend—Hamilton’s novels are a triumph of deft characterization, offbeat humor, unlikely compassion, and raw suspense. In recent years, Hamilton has undergone a remarkable revival, with his champions including Doris Lessing, David Lodge, Nick Hornby, and Sarah Waters. Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky is a tale of obsession and betrayal that centers on a seedy pub in a run-down part of London. Bob the waiter skimps and saves and fantasizes about writing a novel, until he falls for the pretty prostitute Jenny and blows it all. Kindly Ella, Bob’s co-worker, adores Bob, but is condemned to enjoy nothing more than the attentions of the insufferable Mr. Eccles; Jenny, out on the street, is out of love, hope, and money. We watch with pity and horror as these three vulnerable and yet compellingly ordinary people meet and play out bitter comedies of longing and frustration. Included: The Midnight Bell (1929) The Siege of Pleasure (1932) The Plains of Cement (1934)


Why I Wake Early

Why I Wake Early

Author: Mary Oliver

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2005-04-15

Total Pages: 92

ISBN-13: 9780807068793

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The forty-seven new works in this volume include poems on crickets, toads, trout lilies, black snakes, goldenrod, bears, greeting the morning, watching the deer, and, finally, lingering in happiness. Each poem is imbued with the extraordinary perceptions of a poet who considers the everyday in our lives and the natural world around us and finds a multitude of reasons to wake early.


Mornings on Horseback

Mornings on Horseback

Author: David McCullough

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2007-05-31

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 0743218302

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The National Book Award–winning biography that tells the story of how young Teddy Roosevelt transformed himself from a sickly boy into the vigorous man who would become a war hero and ultimately president of the United States, told by master historian David McCullough. Mornings on Horseback is the brilliant biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. Hailed as “a masterpiece” (John A. Gable, Newsday), it is the winner of the Los Angeles Times 1981 Book Prize for Biography and the National Book Award for Biography. Written by David McCullough, the author of Truman, this is the story of a remarkable little boy, seriously handicapped by recurrent and almost fatal asthma attacks, and his struggle to manhood: an amazing metamorphosis seen in the context of the very uncommon household in which he was raised. The father is the first Theodore Roosevelt, a figure of unbounded energy, enormously attractive and selfless, a god in the eyes of his small, frail namesake. The mother, Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, is a Southerner and a celebrated beauty, but also considerably more, which the book makes clear as never before. There are sisters Anna and Corinne, brother Elliott (who becomes the father of Eleanor Roosevelt), and the lovely, tragic Alice Lee, TR’s first love. All are brought to life to make “a beautifully told story, filled with fresh detail” (The New York Times Book Review). A book to be read on many levels, it is at once an enthralling story, a brilliant social history and a work of important scholarship which does away with several old myths and breaks entirely new ground. It is a book about life intensely lived, about family love and loyalty, about grief and courage, about “blessed” mornings on horseback beneath the wide blue skies of the Badlands.


John Joseph Mathews

John Joseph Mathews

Author: Michael Snyder

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2017-05-11

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0806158832

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John Joseph Mathews (1894–1979) is one of Oklahoma’s most revered twentieth-century authors. An Osage Indian, he was also one of the first Indigenous authors to gain national renown. Yet fame did not come easily to Mathews, and his personality was full of contradictions. In this captivating biography, Michael Snyder provides the first book-length account of this fascinating figure. Known as “Jo” to all his friends, Mathews had a multifaceted identity. A novelist, naturalist, biographer, historian, and tribal preservationist, he was a true “man of letters.” Snyder draws on a wealth of sources, many of them previously untapped, to narrate Mathews’s story. Much of the writer’s family life—especially his two marriages and his relationships with his two children and two stepchildren—is explored here for the first time. Born in the town of Pawhuska in Indian Territory, Mathews attended the University of Oklahoma before venturing abroad and earning a second degree from Oxford. He served as a flight instructor during World War I, traveled across Europe and northern Africa, and bought and sold land in California. A proud Osage who devoted himself to preserving Osage culture, Mathews also served as tribal councilman and cultural historian for the Osage Nation. Like many gifted artists, Mathews was not without flaws. And perhaps in the eyes of some critics, he occupies a nebulous space in literary history. Through insightful analysis of his major works, especially his semiautobiographical novel Sundown and his meditative Talking to the Moon, Snyder revises this impression. The story he tells, of one remarkable individual, is also the story of the Osage Nation, the state of Oklahoma, and Native America in the twentieth century.


Our Osage Hills

Our Osage Hills

Author: Michael Snyder

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-07-24

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1611463025

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This revealing book presents a selection of lost articles from “Our Osage Hills,” a newspaper column by the renowned Osage writer, naturalist, and historian, John Joseph Mathews. Signed only with the initials “J.J.M.,” Mathews’s column featured regularly in the Pawhuska Daily Journal-Capital during the early 1930s. While Mathews is best known for his novel Sundown (1934), the pieces gathered in this volume reveal him to be a compelling essayist. Marked by wit and erudition, Mathews’s column not only evokes the unique beauty of the Osage prairie, but also takes on urgent political issues, such as ecological conservation and Osage sovereignty. In Our Osage Hills, Michael Snyder interweaves Mathews’s writings with original essays that illuminate their relevant historical and cultural contexts. The result isan Osage-centric chronicle of the Great Depression, a time of environmental and economic crisis for the Osage Nation and country as a whole. Drawing on new historical and biographical research, Snyder’s commentaries highlight the larger stakes of Mathews’s reflections on nature and culture and situate them within a fascinating story about Osage, Native American, and American life in the early twentieth century. In treating topics that range from sports, art, film, and literature to the realities and legacies of violence against the Osages, Snyder conveys the broad spectrum of Osage familial, social, and cultural history.


Sundown

Sundown

Author: John Joseph Mathews

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780806121604

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Challenge Windzer, the mixed-blood protagonist of this compelling autobiographical novel, was born at the beginning of the twentieth century "when the god of the great Osages was still dominate over the wild prairie and the blackjack hills" of northeast Oklahoma Territory. Named by his father to be "a challenge to the disinheritors of his people," Windzer finds it hard to fulfill his destiny, despite oil money, a university education, and the opportunities presented by the Great War and the roaring twenties. Critics have praised Sundown generously, both as a literary work and a vignette into the Native American past.


Eye Killers

Eye Killers

Author: A. A. Carr

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2014-08-28

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0806172398

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Lurking in the caves of eastern New Mexico, Falke, a thousand-year-old vampire, chooses his next bride: Melissa Roanhorse, an Albuquerque teenager. To regain his granddaughter’s life, Michael Roanhorse, an old Navajo sheepherder wise to the power of myth, must outwit the vampire and his loyal coven. So begins A.A. Carr’s Eye Killers, a novel that combines the Eastern European legend of the vampire with the Navajo tale of the monster slayer. The songs of Michael Roanhorse’s childhood include potent chants passed down through his grandmother, who sang to him of Changing Woman and her Warrior Twins, Monster Slayer and Child of the Water. But Michael’s spiritual strength and his memory have waned with the years. Who is left to help reunite him with his family and his family with their heritage? Michael enlists Diana Logan, Melissa’s young English teacher, to wrestle Melissa from the vampire. But to conquer Falke they must also overpower his coven: Elizabeth, captured by Falke in the 1850s during her family’s journey along the Santa Fe Trail, and Hanna, once a prostitute in Old Albuquerque, who aspires to supplant Falke’s vampire reign. Michael must invoke ancient traditions to bring Melissa home. The elders undertake to teach Diana, but her Irish-American heritage has not prepared her for a fight against shape-shifting vampires who have lived-and murdered-for centuries. In Eye Killers, Carr delivers an imaginative clash of cultures-both a suspenseful thriller and a valid rendering of Navajo and Pueblo tribal life in contemporary New Mexico. His inventiveness, expressed through melodic prose and layers of fine storytelling, weaves new legends of the American Southwest.


Old Three Toes and Other Tales of Survival and Extinction

Old Three Toes and Other Tales of Survival and Extinction

Author: John Joseph Mathews

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2015-01-09

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0806149833

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Mathews shows us the world through the animals’ eyes and ears and noses. His convincing portrayals of their intelligence recall the fiction of Jack London and Ernest Thompson Seton. Like these literary ancestors, Mathews originally intended his nature stories for boys. But the stories transcend boundaries of age, gender, and geography. Mathews writes not just to inspire his readers with nature’s beauty but to demonstrate the interrelatedness of humans, animals, and the landscapes in which they interact.